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We need metrics and marketing


Duion

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Can we have a visitor counter? I mean having a visitor counter is essential to having a website, since otherwise you don't know, if anyone actually visits it. That is like the most basic common sense, but it seems like we do not have it.


Later if you have a visitor counter, you should do marketing to increase visitors, so people interested in the content can find it more easily also the most basic common sense,


So has anyone of the nonexistent admins or steering committee members ever thought about that? If not you should consider doing so.


First I wanted to post this as an answer into the thread "Curious fantasy and hypothesis", but I think this is an issue of itself and the bigger issue. I mean debating about details is meaningless, if we do not even have metrics to see, if what we do has any effect. When we have metrics, I think doing marketing or SEO would help the engine more than anything else, since more users contribute more.

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well, this is still part of the reason why I started that thread, so its still linked, I just posted a reply to that thread about the people we do have working on the engine are not the same people who create documentation, the same is true for all other functions of a 'business' which this, in reality, is to some degree. There are staff for some functions (engine development) but we have no staff for the organisation, while I'm currently trying to do some of that it's not enough and I'm far from the best person, but perhaps a little is better than none, at least I have to think that way.


Regarding metrics specifically, I'd be surprised if they don't exist, but combine that with there's nobody to take that data and work/act on it we cycle back to the original problem.

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There are tools and way to estimate traffic even when there is no metric on it and I would assume visitors of this website are around 100 daily, which is not much. Most people are probably from the old community and new visitors are mostly nonexistent.


But of course having a real visitor counter would help more than deducing the visitor count from other factors that are less accurate.


Marketing would mostly consist of placing backlinks to this website on genuine other websites, that is what the spammers are trying with our forum, they place links to have their scam websites rank higher and gain more visitors.

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I agree, metrics would be a useful starting point for figuring out what avenues of approach will yield the best results. However, I think we can perhaps make some judgements based on reasoning and the observable statistics of other major websites in the meantime. For example, github and the google results for game engines:


https://github.com/collections/game-engines

https://github.com/topics/game-engine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines.


There isn't much we can do with the wiki entry, except update it when there is something spectacular with which to update it, but we can contemplate what happens when someone sees that Torque3D might be a match, and clicks through. What do they see? How does that effect their decision? Is the decision they make in line with reality -- in other words, if they decide to try it, or click away, does the engine actually match up with what the impression that it makes to lead to that decision? Is there a different front we can present that would allow them to better see the reality and make a better choice (in theory, and in my opinion, this would be that there are goods odds that if there is a valid reason to not use UE4 or Unity, T3D is the best available option).

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@suncaller

Do you think you can convince our nonexistent steering committee to update pages like: https://www.moddb.com/engines/torque-3d that have not been updated for 8 years now.

I mean it is probably too late now for that, since moddb is pretty dead, but it shows the ignorance and nonexistentness of our leadership, that cannot manage to update the description and screenshots of the engine on that website in like 6 years of time. Some things are changed now, but only because I took charge of the account, handed it over to JeffR and told him what to do.


There are maybe 100 websites like that were you could mention the engine or update the entry in some wiki, or write forum posts. Yes there is not much marketing we can do, but the little we could do is not done for the most part. I tried to do it myself a few times, but I was insulted as a shill or by our own community that I should not be in charge of that task or whatever so I stopped doing promotion. I'm also tired of begging others to do things, just because people somehow do not trust me.

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if it were up to me those pages would be deleted entirely, moddb its users and its management are morally corrupt, they post copyrighted materials, they have no curation, they let people shit on and review bomb and vote bomb any software they like without any level or curation at all.


Speaking of non-existent, let's discuss your contribution to torque, one old demo with some slightly modified art and a game which is just a badly reskinned version of the FPS tutorial code, countless times shitting on people in power because you disagreed with them, countless childish temper tantrums because you didn't get your way, dozens of political rants about open source software and insulting anybody who doesn't agree with your tin-foil-hat interpretation of the world.


I may not be king of smiles and fairies, but I don't shit on people because of displaced idealogical zealotry or bigoted ideas, I may be a little sarcastic with people who use C# or Java (ok, very sarcastic to Java users, they earned it, #notsorry), but in the decade and a bit of being part of this community I can only think of one person who has a level of personality so toxic that has reverted to pure trolling.

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To make the decision to have it deleted would require an existent committee to make that decision, which we do not have.


My point is, if we have it, either update it, or don't, but don't leave it half updated and in a half derelict state, it does not look good.


But we kind of need it, since most people using the engine have their game on there as well and then they would be left without an engine, which looks even worse. If we delete it, it would require the community to go with it, otherwise we would just be harming ourselves. So deleting it is not an option currently and by the way it was just an example of our nonexistent leadership.

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I'm still trying to figure out why you are hating on the SC, its like you really just want to hate people for the sake of hating instead of pushing the blame where it needs to be.


This is 110% the fuckup of garage games, and the absolute cluster fuck of assholes that the company has been since IAC infected the company with greedy pricks.

The one an only decent thing they've done in the past decade is let the engine go to the public, they even fucked that up I've no idea how! Did I mention they were a cluster fuck?


How about you stop blaming the few people who are trying to get something done, either chip in or just leave nobody is interested in your superiority complex or your non-solutions. I am beginning to wonder why the fuck I even advocated not banning you when many voices in the community figured it would probably be a good idea.

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It does not matter if I hate on the SC or not, since it does not exist anyway, I more hate its nonexistentness than its supposed existentness.

And no it is not the fault of Garagegames, they even spend resources on maintaining and releasing the engine to open source for a while, so they did more than they needed to. If they had not "fucked up" we would not have the engine open source, so it is a good thing within the bad.

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Spitting vitrol doesn't really help anyone, especially at people actually doing stuff(even if it isn't the stuff you want them to be doing right this second).


On the subject of the moddb page, it actually has gotten a few minor updates, and I've been discussing with Blood what information needs to go on it as we update everything and interlink the documentation, forums, site, etc.


Just saying "update it" doesn't really mean anything if we don't have a solid idea of what information needs to be updated. But yes, it some information is definitely still out of date and will be updated.


Otherwise, I concur that an expanded push on marketing is a good idea. It's something we've discussed in the discord, but getting everything interlinked between the various community elements(as said above, the site, forums, discord, wiki, moddb page, etc) so you can always readily and easily navigate around the engine and community's ecosystem would be an incredibly useful tool to facilitate what marketing is pushed out. That way, it almost doesn't even matter what is linked, because it allows people to be pulled into the community ecosystem.


I dunno that visitor counters really matter, and no sites have used those since the 90's, but I'll see if the site and forums and stuff have any kind of analytics tracking for visits, how many times the sites have been linked to, etc. That's more useful information than a basic tracker that sits in the bottom corner of a webpage and is ignored anyways. As was mentioned, having that sort of info(especially info about linking) would let us better figure out what places provide a good return of interest when linked from.

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@JeffR

It is not about posting updates, it is about updating the site, like first you update the description, since there is still the description from the commercial days that says like "Torque 3D is the best full source, low cost solution out there. " then maybe update the screenshots with some up to date stuff, ah I forgot that's not possible, since we have not changed the visuals or produced any new demo material in all of our history, but that's another issue.


With visitor counter I don't mean the thing from the 90s but something that counts visitors, so you get a rough idea how many visitors you get and from where maybe as well.

@LukasPJ is the admin so he must know of those things. First you need to have some analytics and then you do some SEO and see what happens.

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"then you do some SEO", I do like the way you casually toss this out like its a triviality that doesn't take a metric ton of manhours and probably money to even make more than a trivial dent in the effectively flooded SEO market for game engines. Like you don't have to pay to own a specific set of terms at which point you run headlong into the two engines that pretty much dominate every single search regardless.


A few years back there used to be relevant sites, I'm not sure they have relevance any more in the youtube age. What we really need is users, internet word of mouth is the new word of mouth.


Either way, if you have a way to get past the unity review bombing squad that has existed for the past decade or so that would be useful, that community has been deliberately shitting on torque for years one way or another. Not so much lately, since GarageGames has been doing the work for them :p

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"With visitor counter I don't mean the thing from the 90s but something that counts visitors, so you get a rough idea how many visitors you get and from where maybe as well."


Ah, ok so you meant the same thing I did. Fair enough on that end then.


And metadata tags on the main domain site isn't something that occured to me, so thanks for the suggestion on that.

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And metadata tags on the main domain site isn't something that occured to me, so thanks for the suggestion on that.

You could also go crazy and do metatags for every page. The topic is a bit complicated since there are many kind of metatags and standards, but you should at least define content type, description and tags, so search engines know what content there is. The forum probably uses some forum software and has bots from search engines, so that should be fine, but the front page, wiki pages etc could be defined with metatags.

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First of all torque3d.org, I believe it is hosted from this repo

https://github.com/crabmusket/Torque3DLandingPage

So theoretically anyone can contribute, but Buckmaster is not active in the community anymore, so I don't know if PRs are handled.

Furthermore, it was really freaking difficult finding that repo so I don't blame anyone for not contributing to the landing page.


For the forums, yes those are all SEO optimized to the extent phpbb does out of the box, I'm certain we can flip some switches and fill out some forms, but it has support for bots and the like.


For the wiki, I would expect it to be fairly optimized, as WikiDot is a commercial product, but I dunno.


As for statistics, there is a mod that does something, but don't know how much

https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/mod/phpbb_statistics/


I don't want to install a Google tracker or any other of those "free" tools. I think don't think we'd use it enough to justify the cost.

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I'll volunteer to help with getting these updates to happen, but can you point out exactly what you want changed? I've got my own list of modernizations that need to happen, and I'd be happy to add any solutions you have to my notes. Problems -- well, there are plenty of those, and we can all see them for ourselves. The issue is there's not enough bandwidth to deal with stuff that's not immediately important to our individual interests.


Also, can we all please roll the flaming back just a tad? The community is small enough as it is, let's put in some effort into trying to be more welcoming and less hateful. The reality is, we're getting heated about it because we care. That's something we have in common. Let's focus on that, and try to overlook the other stuff as much as possible.

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So theoretically anyone can contribute, but Buckmaster is not active in the community anymore, so I don't know if PRs are handled.

 

Yes he is a nonexistent member of the nonexistent steering committee, that's why I'm preaching for years to get an existing steering committee, since having an existing steering committee, would solve a lot of issues by itself.


Regarding analytics, yes I would not install google analytics, I for example use: https://matomo.org/ it is pretty easy to use, you just install it and can operate it through web interface. It is self hosted and open source, so there are no costs.


Maybe we really do not need it, but I think the only thing that is visited regularly is the forum, the other pages are kind of unknown for the most part, so it would be nice to activate those as well.

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